Keynote for Collaboration Virtual Conference

I. Introduction

But before I go any further, for a conference called "Teaching in Cyberspace," I think it’s wise to confront a few of the larger questions before moving on to examine some strategies for accomplishing that teaching. First, I would like to question the move to cyberspace teaching. Everywhere we hear about where technology "is taking us," but we might want to question whether it's advisable to "be taken" where some forces want us to go. The computer hardware and software industry eagerly pushes "solutions" for their version of education on us. Meanwhile, our leaders are saying that we're going to get all the schools wired, and that we’re all going to go on the Internet, and through distance learning meet the needs of students in almost every imaginable circumstance. Of course, it is a laudable goal to meet the needs of a diverse student population, but it has to be TEACHERS who determine whether and how to meet the challenges, to choose the tools, and to set the curriculum for cyberspace and distance learning. There are some courses that simply cannot be taught effectively on the Internet, and we teachers need to be able to make that clear to administrators and others who might think otherwise. And when it comes time to choose tools and software, we should be the ones to test and select the programs most suited to our pedagogical goals.

Teachers are being asked to work long hours to develop classes for Internet delivery, and cyberspace components for existing classes, but they often have little help from their institutions, and little release time or pay to really take the time to do it well. So we’re seeing more and more teachers who are either on the burnout cycle from too much work, and classes that are not as effective as they could be because teachers don’t have the time to plan them properly or interact with students effectively. As committed teachers, we need to initiate campus-wide discussions to address the issues of support, release, and compensation (not to mention ownership of course content!) for cyberspace teaching. We need to ask for proper training and time to create Internet course components and use them effectively; not to have that time may make our classes less organized and interesting, could burn us out, and could result in lowered student evaluations of our performance.

Further, we sometimes assume that students are pretty much alike, and that we can bring about learning in one student in much the same way as we do with the others. By some accounts, cyberspace teaching should be able to reach all kinds of students, if they are motivated enough. And yet the study of learning styles and multiple intelligences has taught us that students are different in the ways they process information and learn, and may respond to the various tools and strategies of teaching in different ways. The conscientious teacher will need to take these differences into account when planning cyberspace activities for classes, and be ready to work more intensively with some types of students, or just know when to give up on some types of activities with some students. Above all, for on-campus classes I advocate complementarity among face-to-face, written, and cyberspace activities, balancing the mediation of the computer screen with other forms of interaction. But what of completely distance-learning classes? How can they meet the needs of a diverse student population? Read on! One answer below relies on finding ways to cultivate interaction, class community, and class identity in cyberspace.

As our culture dives headlong into computer mediated communication, lured on by promises of faster, cheaper, and better access to the Internet, we have witnessed many problems -- what Charles Moran calls the growing pains of an "amphibious condition" (Moran 14) in our move into cyberspace. We’ve crawled out of the primordial slime of print text, to a degree, and have grown proto-appendages to deal with cyberspace communication, but we're still caught up in many of the conventions or print culture. And despite our new appendages, our ways of finding our way online, we are encountering the drawbacks of the rather voiceless, disembodied texts we exchange in cyberspace. They just aren’t the same as face-to-face or telephone conversations, nor do they convey the personal touch offered by the handwriting in a conventional letter. So my modest suggestions below make simple recommendations about balancing virtual with face-to-face and finding ways to engage students in cyberspace discussions.

II. A question of balance: Some notes on learning styles, balance and cyberspace teaching and learning

As cyberspace pedagogy has matured in the last few years, the focus has moved from celebrating what worked in a particular class to finding out what did not work, or what worked for some students but not for others. Research has shown that students come to our classes with different aptitudes and skills, and with different ways of perceiving and understanding what we have to offer them. So, an important movement in general education theory, that of learning styles and multiple intelligences, here dovetails with cyberspace pedagogy.

Not only do we need to find out as best we can who our students are and what approaches they bring with them, we also need to investigate how and why different technological approaches fit different kinds of students. That means finding out more about how students are different, what kinds of learning styles and intelligences they might have, and how we can use technology to help them. It also might even mean knowing when NOT to use certain technologies or technological pedagogies.

We can use some existing approaches to learning styles to fairly successfully gauge where our students are coming from, their cognitive styles, and the activities which might best help them learn. Such approaches as the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, the Gardner Self Inventory, and Multiple Intelligence Theory are providing new ways for us to understand our students' needs; they are changing the ways we design activities for the writing classroom, how we individualize activities for different learners, and how we decide what technologies might be most appropriate for certain kinds of learners.

Further, since technologies such as the Internet and computer mediated communication (including web pages, electronic mail, and MUDs and MOOs) have come further into the mainstream in the last decade, we need to be vigilant about the effects some of these technologies may have on our students. These tools may privilege some students, and put others at a disadvantage. Therefore we need to balance the different sorts of computer-mediated, face to face and paper-based activities when we plan activities for our classes.

Here, I want to ask two simple questions:

1. How well can your students do what most of us teachers can do with e-mail, discussion groups, and asynchronous conversation on the network? Are they good at it? Have they learned to swim in or navigate across the sea of text with the ease that we do?

As much as we ourselves may find computers, networks, MOOs and MUDs, e-mail, and the web empowering and enjoyable in our work and lives, we have to realize that all of our students are not the same sort of wordsmiths that we are. Many of them do not find that words come to them easily, or that reading a computer screen is a skill that comes naturally. We're naturals; we can type quickly, and almost effortlessly put our thoughts into coherent sentences, and most of us have found ways to quickly find information in networked texts, such as discussion e-mails and web pages. We know what to keep and what to ignore. We've at least made it to the "amphibious condition" (Moran 14) with electronic discourse. We've pulled ourselves out of the primordial slime of print text and crawled with our proto legs into the new territory of cyberspace.

Even though we may believe that an environment such as a chat room, a MOO, or e-mail might spark students into writing and discussing by pulling them into a quick-paced writing situation with a ready-made audience, we are making assumptions about our students, assumptions which may have negative effects on their confidence and willingness to write and learn.

We need to find out as much as possible about our students, using some of the methods listed above, to be able to help them communicate, learn, and survive in cyberspace discourse. If there are problems with typing, or hesitance to commit words to the screen, or to say things that others will read, we may need to find these out by questionnaire or interview at the outset of a class semester, then make adjustments for the students. We may then be able to arrange tutorials, or alternate activities using different technologies, for some students. Or, as I have said elsewhere, we might make constructive use of the cognitive dissonance that often occurs with some forms of cyberspace discourse.

I like to think of each of my classes as a potential three-ring circus. That is, when we need to do it, we have groups of students and individual students at the same time working in a number of media on a number of different sorts of projects. While one group might be MOOing, another could be talking face to face, while another is clustered around one computer, collaboratively drafting an essay. Another group might be either creating a web page or doing research on the web. The lack of a single focus can cause problems for some instructors, but I believe that the variety of learning styles and aptitudes in the class, along with the range of projects students might be working on, justifies the multipurposed, three-ring circus approach.

2. Just because we CAN make our students' writing, thoughts, and work available to other students and even the world through class listserv groups, MOO and web pages, should we? What is the distinction between public and private discourse in our classes? How do student responses vary in public and private settings? Should class work and web pages be open to the world?

When we plunge students into written conversations with their classmates, through listserves, and let the class and even the world see their work on the web, we are making assumptions about the need for public discourse in cyberspace classes. Not all writing is public, nor should it be, and some students may need to do some writing that is only for the teacher, or for another student or group of students. Further, some students may not want their names and e-mail addresses on publicly accessible web pages and class discussion list archives, where sophisticated address-harvesting software can find them and add them to annoying mailing lists for cyberspace junk mail. We should seriously consider password-protecting student work on the web, but at the very least we need to explain to students that putting anything on the web exposes them to sophisticated search engines and possibly even unwanted attention.

During the first days of class, we should also discuss with our students the differences among private person-to-person discourse, public lists -- which can be read by the whole class -- and the even more public web sites. Following the Frierian model we may be able to have the students themselves decide how much of their writing should be public and how much should be private, and all of the gradations in between. Such planning and discussion can only help students be more responsible and come to own the process of their education. And the teacher, too, shows concern and responsibility in examining his or her own styles, traits, and preferences with the class. It is reflective practice, which includes acknowledgment of differing student styles and needs.

So, when you plan your cyberspace activities, and your uses of technology for your classes, I suggest that you try to maintain balance and complementarity among on-screen, off-screen, and face to face activities, and between public and private writing. This balance could be as important to our classes as recognizing and accommodating the learning styles of as many of our students as we can.

But what if your class is entirely on line, and students can’t get to your campus for class meetings at all? Read on…

III. Interactivity: one key to a successful online class

"Partisans of the digital revolution protest that the Internet ... is interactive, not passive. But to the extent it is geared to quantity and speed of communication, it is interactive vacuity, a reciprocal fix to keep thought at bay, producing a global village of village idiots" (Neuhaus 15).

Could Neuhaus be right? Could we be producing a global village of village idiots? Granted, much of the information and communication on the Internet is pushed at us, one-way, almost as if a firehose were aimed at us, and we need to help students evaluate it and navigate through it. This sort of Critical Internet Literacy is the subject of the last section of this presentaion. Similarly, many online classes consist simply of class materials put on the web for students to use. But one big problem often encountered with cyberspace classes is that students don’t develop what many of us consider the key elements of a good class: community, identity, and responsibility toward other students.

In my experience, a good class becomes its own community, with leaders, wit, serious critique, and a lot of public discourse. It develops an identity, such that you will hear students talking in the hall about the class as if it were a social organization. Finally, students come to be responsible for and toward each other in a good class. They speak to each other with respect, and go out of their way to help others understand the subject matter. In my experiences with online teaching, however, I have found that even when I have students interact in cyberspace they sometimes do not develop a sense of community and responsibility. I once had 20 groups of six students each, two in New York City, two in Louisiana, and two in Rapid City, teamed up to collaborate on documents. By the end of the project, I could not believe how many were angry at partners they had never seen in distant towns. It is for this reason that I must recommend that even if your class is scheduled to be entirely distance learning, entirely online, you make every effort to get the class together physically, if only for a day or so at the beginning and end of the semester.

Most of you already use E-mail, and some of you belong to Internet discussion groups of one sort or another. Hopefully the group discussion helps you teach, and informs you about developments in your field; it keeps you on your toes, learning and growing. With proper orientation, good instructions, and good discussion prompts, students too can benefit in similar ways from discussion on a class Internet group.

For those unfamiliar with these groups, a brief explanation may be in order. The Internet originally came about as ARPAnet because the US department of defense needed a fail-safe network for the transferral of information from computer to computer in case of emergency or war. Once the machines were connected up, however, the inevitable occurred. Humans like to communicate, and they found the linked computers a perfect medium for passing messages. Soon those lucky enough to be connected to the government network were conversing about issues through electronic mail, and when the government opened the network to university researchers, beginning with the sciences, email discussion blossomed. With the advent of listserve type software, which takes a single message and posts it to a "list" of a few to a few thousand addresses, organized discussion groups came into being.

You can create active learning communities in your classes by asking students to do more than just post class assignments to your Internet discussion group. Try to encourage them to feel free to volunteer information about themselves, their needs, desires, aspirations, and problems, to the group. Perhaps you, the teacher, will at first need to model these kinds of messages and provide positive feedback to those who volunteer information.

Taking the idea of interactivity one step further, you can make the discussion synchronous if you use some sort of chat software, such as MOO/MUD or a webbed chat room. A MOO is just a form of MUD (Multiple User Dimension) software which enables shared, text-based virtual realities to be created. Originally, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was the preferred form of group real-time communication for early online classes, but some teachers discovered MUDs and appreciated the fact that, in addition to being able to type to each other, you could also describe the workspace in which you had your discussions. Many of my colleagues have their own virtual offices on MUDs and hold virtual office hours there. Students can log in,join the teacher, and discuss issues related to the class. I have also created work rooms in which my students could have group meetings. They were very creative in describing these rooms, and giving the rooms descriptions helped them develop a sense of group and class identity.

Some students get to be faster and better writers if they keep practicing engaging and interacting with others in meaningful discussion on a MUD. They develop ideas with each other, and even sometimes become playful, while still engaging the class topics. Educational theorists such as Piaget have noted that play can help people learn because their minds are engaged and open, and they are curious and interested because they are having fun.

IV. Critical Internet Literacy

Our students are increasingly turning to cyberspace to do research for our classes; whether we like it or not, it seems to be much easier to them to surf the web than to go to the library. Yet the web is jam-packed with information with no guide for the undiscerning about what sites are reliable, credible and valuable. Most of us need to deal with the problem of critical internet literacy at some point in our classes, so as to help students discriminate among webbed sources of information.

Rather than enabling us to feel connected and close to others, and to have good information at our fingertips, could the web be a sticky trap for the unwary visitor? If our students are those visitors, what responsibilities do we as teachers have for keeping them safe? The answer, of course isn't in assuming, as do Cliff Stoll, Mark Slouka, and others, that the Internet is a useless waste of time and an ethical wasteland, so we should avoid it. I think that the answer lies in extending the notion of critical information literacy to the web, and in finding ways to teach our students to be discerning of web sources.

Of course, some administrators, and some teachers would claim that the web really isn't the territory of our classes, that we should not spend time examining the web in class. But first, where else are they getting these skills? Do your students have classes in which they learn web skills? Mine do not, and I think that because so many of them are ALREADY going to the web for so much information for researched writing projects, we need to include those skills in our classes. Indeed, I would even hazard a guess that some of our students eventually will be writing web pages as part of their professional duties in future careers, so it is not wrong to talk about credibility and effective communication of web pages in our classes, if we care about our students being prepared for careers. And if our administrators don't understand why we need to do this in our classes, we need to remind them that some students are falling through the cracks, and that they will in some ways be disadvantaged travelers on the information superhighway.

But how, then, do you teach this critical web literacy? It isn't an easy question, but it's probably going to take some time in class. If you have access to an overhead projector, LCD panel, and networked computer, then at least a class period can be spent on visiting pages, hopefully ones the students have found, which demonstrate varying degrees of credibility and effective design.

We need to ask questions such as "Is the author identified?" What can you find out about that author? Is she or he associated with a school, or with some other organization, and if an organization, is it a well known organization known for being fairly objective, or is it a group which might be inclined to political biases? Does the page cite other well-known sources or people? Is it well designed, and does its tone of reasoning seem fair? Is it meant to persuade you? How?

Students can also be shown some fairly good resources for web page evaluation (see below), and in fact use the criteria to do exercises like the one above in class.

Evaluating web pages exercises one kind of critical thinking skill, but creating web pages makes students producers of knowledge; they learn by constructing a logical set of web pages for themselves, for a class project, or for the class in general. They construct a persona for themselves, and by developing the web page, learn what's important, how it fits together, and how to represent it effectively for a particular audience.

For more information on this topic, please visit Michael Day and Roger Ochse's "Critical Thinking and the Internet" web site

View Michael Day's web page and resources

Send a message to Michael Day

Send a message to our Cyberconf discussion group